TinyURLs can be very useful when you have a long url to type into something like an iphone or some other mobile device where the keyboard is rather tedious. On a few of my sites I was looking for a way to automatically generate a tinyURL with the least amount of effort. Since I use wordpress for most of them I decided to go with a shortcode.

Shortcodes seem to be gaining a fair amount of attention in the wordpress community and with good reason. The Shortcode API, which was new in wordpress 2.5, is a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in your posts. Shortcodes are written by providing a handler function and they accept parameters too. Here is a wordpress shortcode to generate a tinyURL for a post.

If the url parameter is not defined then the function will attempt to use the wordpress function get_permalink($post->ID) which will return the current posts url. Also you can pass in a parameter if you want to show a tinyURL to another location. Using curl instead of file_get_contents would probably be faster but I didn’t want to make the example to long. The add_shortcode function is what tells the API to use the get_tiny_url function when it encounters the small_url shortcode. Note that this will call on the tinyurl api every page view so it would probably be prudent to set the tiny urls in the database so you only have to check once on a production site although I’m not sure if they expire or not.
This shortcode can be called in the post by typing :

Uniform resource locators (URL) are starting to get very long and I’m getting sick of typing ridiculously long strings into safari on my iphone. I don’t really care about the extra bandwidth, It’s just annoying when you’re on the phone telling someone to go check out a 67 character long url and they mistype it three times.

I’ve just started using the tiny url service and so far it’s been useful. On one of my sites I wanted to generate a tiny url for each of my pages to make them quicker to type in and also so people don’t know what get variables I’ve set until they get there. Here is the PHP function that I used to generate a tiny url for every page on the site.

There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all on the Tiny URL website about this so I’m not sure if it’ll change in the future.
This function passes your desired url to the api-create.php script on the tinyurl domain which returns a nice short url that isn’t a pain to put into your iphone.

Because I’ve been starting to keep a closer eye on my traffic I’ve been logging everything to my databases. When writing reports for this information I noticed that there was huge amounts of traffic from bots. Yahoo, Google, MSN and many others have been hammering my sites quite a lot lately. Since I’m writing my reports in PHP I needed a quick little function to identify whether the visitor was real traffic or some machine scraping my site. I couldn’t find one after a few quick Google queries but the solution was trivial so I wrote my own. Hopefully this will save someone a few minutes. The function is as simple as possible and it seems to be working so far. I’ve been watching it for awhile and it hasn’t missed any yet. I’m assuming that it’s not going to catch everything but it would be nice to get most. Any bot user agent string suggestions would be helpful.

Using my previous wordpress example plugin I’m going to demonstrate how to use ajax within the admin panel. WordPress uses the Simple AJAX Code-Kit (SACK) which is relatively easy to use and understand.

For this example I’m going to expand on my previous example and add a simple javascript function that queries some data from the server. WordPress forces us to do this in a roundabout way. First we have to add two new function hooks. One prints my javascript function in the scripts section of the admin panel and the other is the code that gets called by the ajax sack request.

The ajax_request function is a shell function for the javascript ajax call get_random_number_from_server which is our sack ajax request. Note that we are calling the admin-ajax.php script. This script will handle the calling of the get_random_number function for us because of the action defined above.

I wanted to do a few custom things with one of my site’s stats. PHP made this nice and simple with the $_SERVER array. When someone visits one of your scripts the $_SERVER array is automatically filled so as long as you know the keys then you can get all the information needed. These are the most useful items for identifying a visitor that I found in this using this array.

$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’] gives you their ip address.
$_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] is their user-agent (What browser they are using).
$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] is where they came from.
$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] is the page they want to view.

This data is kinda useless unless you put it in a database so here’s a create table mySQL statement.

I’ve been doing a bit of site scraping using curl and PHP lately. I’ve found that most sites will ban your ip if they think you’re a bot (good thing I’m on DSL) so you need to make them think that your script is a browser. The easiest way to do this is to add a user agent header to your script. Here is an example of getting a results page from google for a specific search query.

So this function will take the search term that was provided and request the results from google for it. Our user agent header makes the script look like firefox.
I put the returned string (The entire google results page) into the google_string variable and return it for parsing out what is needed. My newest scrape experiment is a site called Quick Content and basically scrapes some results from google based on some parameters from google hot trends and posts it all as a feed. It was fun to code up but it is desperate need of a makeover.

I used JSON for the first time today and it’s really nothing special. I’ve heard about it a few times but never really given it much thought and theres no reason I should have. Here is the list of all you really need to know about this syntax for passing around name value pairs and arrays to javascript.

JSON is an acronym for ‘Javascript Object Notation’.

JSON is fast. Mostly because it is recognized natively by Javascript so there’s no processing overhead.

JSON is an ordered list of name value pairs.

JSON is so much easier to read and write than XML due to it’s simplicity.

Apperently (Untested by me) data is formatted as JSON then Ajax can travel across domains.

Almost every language used in web development either already has a JSON library or set of functions. If one doesn’t, then creating functions is a trivial task.

You can also reference the JSON object as if it was an associative array like ‘jsonObject[‘cody’]’ or ‘jsonObject.javascript[‘json’]’ which gives the same values as previously.

If you don’t want to use key/value pairs you can define a normal data array. ‘jsonObject = {‘arrayOfData’: {‘numbers’ : [‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’]}};’ We use indexes for this dataset. Don’t use indexes for the collections defined in the ‘{ }’. ‘jsonObject.arrayOfData.numbers[1]’ will give us ‘2’.